Secret Vampire (13 page)

"No. You've got it completely wrong. Look, you
think I was making out with her, or trifling with her affections or whatever. That's not what was going on
at all. I let you think that because I was tired of
getting the third degree from you-and because I
didn't want you to know what we
were
doing."

"Sure, sure," Phil said in a voice filled with equal measures of sarcasm and contempt. "So what
were
you doing? Drugs?"

James had learned something from his first encounter with Poppy in the hospital. Show and tell
should be done in that order. This time he didn't say
anything; he just grabbed Phil by the hair and jerked his head back.

There was only a single light behind the store, but
it was enough to
give Phil a good view of the bared
fangs looming over him. And it was more than
enough for James, with his night vision, to see Phil
lip's green eyes
dilate as he stared.

Phillip yelled, then went limp.

Not with fear, James knew. He wasn't a coward.
With the shock of disbelief turning to belief.

Phillip swore. "You're
a ..."

"Right." James let him go.

Phil almost lost his balance. He grabbed at the
Dumpster for support. "I don't believe it."

"Yes, you do," James said. He hadn't retracted his
fangs, and he knew that his
eyes were shining silver.
Phil
had
to believe it with James standing right in
front of him.

Phil apparently had the same idea. He was staring
at James as if he wanted to look away, but couldn't.
The color had drained out of his face, and he kept
swallowing as if he were going to be sick.

"God," he said finally. "I knew there was some
thing wrong with you. Weird wrong. I could never
figure out why you gave me the creeps. So this is it."

I disgust him, James realized. It's not just hatred anymore. He thinks I'm less than human.

It didn't augur well for the rest of James's plan.

"Now do you understand how I can help Poppy?"

Phil shook his head slowly. He was leaning against
the wall, one hand still on the Dumpster.

James felt impatience rise in his chest. "Poppy has
a disease. Vampires don't get diseases. Do you need
a road map?"

Phillip's expression said he did.

"If,"
James said through his teeth, "I exchange
enough blood with Poppy to turn her into a vampire,
she won't have cancer anymore. Every cell in her
body will change and she'll end up a perfect speci
men: flawless, disease-free. She'll have powers that
humans don't even dream of. And, incidentally,
she'll be immortal."

There was a long, long silence as James watched
this sink in with Phillip. Phil's thoughts were too
jumbled and kaleidoscopic for James to make any
thing of them, but Phil's eyes got wider and his face
more ashen.

At last Phil said, "You can't do that to her."

It was the
way
he said it. Not as if he were pro
testing an idea because it was too radical, too new.
Not the knee-jerk overreaction that Poppy had had.

He said it with absolute conviction and utmost hor
ror. As if James were threatening to steal Poppy's
soul.

"It's the only way to save her
life,"
James said.

Phil shook his head slowly again, eyes huge and
trancelike. "No. No. She wouldn't want it. Not at
that cost."

"What cost?" James was more than impatient
now, he was defensive and exasperated. If he'd real
ized that this was going to turn into a philosophical debate, he would have picked somewhere less public.
As it was, he had to keep all his senses on the alert
for possible intruders.

Phil let go of the Dumpster and stood on his own
two feet. There was fear mixed with the horror in his eyes, but he faced James squarely.

"It's just-there are some things that humans
think are more important than just staying alive," he
said. "You'll find that out."

I don't believe this, James thought. He sounds like
a junior space captain talking to the alien invaders
in a B movie.
You won't
find Earth people
quite
the easy
mark you imagine.

Aloud, he said, "Are you nuts? Look, Phil, I was
born in San Francisco. I'm not some bug-eyed mon
ster from Alpha Centauri. I eat Wheaties for
breakfast."

"And what do you eat for a midnight snack?" Phil

asked, his green eyes somber and almost childlike.

"Or are the fangs just for decoration?"

Walked right into that one, James's brain told him.
He looked away. "Okay. Touché. There are some
differences. I never said I was a human. But I'm not
some kind of-"

"If you're not a monster, then I don't know
what is."

Don't kill him, James counseled himself frantically.
You have to
convince
him. "Phil, we're not like what
you see at the movies. We're not all-powerful. We can't dematerialize through walls or travel through time, and we don't need to kill to feed. We're not evil, at least not all of us. We're not damned."

"You're unnatural," Phillip said softly, and James could feel that he meant it from his heart. "You're
wrong. You
shouldn't exist."

"Because we're higher up on the food chain than
you?"

"Because people weren't meant to ...
feed
... on other people."

James didn't say that his people didn't think of
Phillip's people as people. He said, "We only do what
we have to do to survive. And Poppy's already
agreed."

Phillip froze. "No. She wouldn't want to become
like you."

"She wants to stay a!ive---or at least, she did, be
fore she got mad at me. Now she's just irrational
because she hasn't got enough of my blood in her to
finish changing her. Thanks to you." He paused, then
said deliberately, "Have you ever seen a three-weekold corpse, Phil? Because that's
what she's going to
become if I don't get to her."

Phil's face twisted. He whirled around and slammed a fist into the metal side of the Dumpster.
"Don't you think I know that?
I've been living with
that since Monday night."

James stood still, heart pounding. Feeling the an
guish Phil was giving off and the pain of Phil's in
jured hand. It was several seconds before he was able
to say
calmly,
"And you think that's better than what
I can give her?"

"It's lousy. It stinks. But, yes, it's better than turning into something that hunts people. That
uses
peo
ple. That's why all the girlfriends, isn't it?"

Once again, James couldn't answer right away.
Phil's problem, he was realizing, was that Phil was
far too smart for his own good. He thought too much.
"Yeah. That's why all the girlfriends," he said at last,
tiredly. Trying not to see this from Phil's point of view.

"Just tell me one thing, Rasmussen."
Phillip
straightened and looked him dead in the eye. "Did
you"-he stopped and swallowed-"feed on Poppy
before she got sick?"

"No."

Phil let out his breath. "That's good. Because if you
had
,
I'd have killed you."

James believed him. He was much stronger than Phil, much faster, and he'd never been afraid of a
human before. But just at that moment he had no
doubt that Phil would somehow have found a way
to do it.

"Look, there's something you don't understand,"
he said. "Poppy did
want this, and it's something we've already started. She's only just beginning to
change; if she dies now, she won't become a vampire.
But she might not die all thee way, either. She could
end up a walking corpse. A zombie, you know?
Mindless. Body rotting, but immortal."

Phil's mouth quivered with revulsion. "You're just
saying that to scare me."

James looked away. "I've seen it happen."

"I don't believe you."

"I've seen it
firsthand!
"
Dimly James realized he
was yelling and that he'd grabbed Phil by the shirt
front. He was out of control-and he didn't care.
"I've seen it happen to somebody
I
cared
about, all
right?"

And then, because Phil was still shaking his head:
"I was only four years old and I had a nanny. All
the rich kids in San Francisco have nannies. She
was human."

"Let go," Phil muttered, pulling at James's wrist.
He was breathing hard-he didn't want to hear this.

"I was crazy about her. She gave me everything
my mom didn't. Love, attention-she was never too
busy. I called her Miss Emma."

^“
Let go.”

"But my parents thought I was too attached to her.
So they took me on a little vacation-and they didn't
let me feed. Not for three days. By the time they brought me back, I was starving. Then they sent Miss
Emma up to put me to bed."

Phil had stopped fighting now. He stood with his
head bowed and turned to one side so he wouldn't
have to look at James. James threw his words at the
averted face.

"I was only four. I couldn't stop myself. And the thing is, I wanted to. If you'd asked me who I'd rather have die, me or Miss Emma, I'd've said me. But when you're starving, you lose control. So I fed on her, and all the time I was crying and trying to stop. And when I finally could stop, I knew it was
too late."

There was a pause. James suddenly realized that his fingers were locked in an
agonizing
cramp. He let
go of Phil's shirt slowly. Phil said nothing.

"She was just lying there on the floor. I thought,
wait, if I give her my own blood she'll be a vampire,
and everything will be okay." He wasn't yelling any
more. He wasn't even really speaking to Phillip, but
staring out into the dark parking lot. "So I cut myself
and let the blood run into her mouth. She swallowed
some of it before my parents came up and stopped
me. But not enough."

A longer pause-and James remembered why he
was telling the story. He looked at Phillip.

"She died that night but not all the way. The two
different kinds of blood were fighting inside her. So
by morning she was walking around again-but she
wasn't Miss Emma anymore. She drooled and her skin was gray and her eyes were flat like a corpse's.
And when she started to-rot-my dad took her out
to Inverness and buried her. He killed her first." Bile
rose in James's throat and he added almost in a whis
per, "I hope he killed her first."